Editorial Nutrient - Wide Association Studies Another Road to the Same Destination

Apart from the specific findings of this analysis, the authors encourage the use of what they call a nutrientwide association study, analogous to a genome-wide association study (GWAS), to investigate dietary determinants of health outcomes.1 Similar to the agnostic approach used in a GWAS, the features of their approach include the following: (1) the inclusion of all available nutrient exposures; (2) nonincorporation of previous knowledge; (3) adjustment of statistical tests for multiple comparisons; (4) division of the primary data set into training and test subsets; and (5) the use of a confirmatory data set. The primary objectives are to analyze all of the possible nutrient-disease hypotheses and to avoid false-positive conclusions.